Category Archives: English Language Arts

This category contains domain-specific material–reading and writing expository prose, interpreting literature etc.–designed to meet the Common Core standards in English language arts while at the same time being flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse and idiosyncratic learners.

5 Confucian Blessings

“Longevity * Wealth * Health * Civility * A Natural Death

The Five Blessings can be symbolized by a peach—a very auspicious Chinese symbol, linked with wishes for long life (often expressed by the number 10,000, with is suggestion of infinity of immortality). An image of nine peaches and five bats (linked to a peach because they sound familiar) is therefore coloured with all sorts of suggestions about all these blessing.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

Adapted Research Papers 6: Jesse Owens from A to Z

Here’s yet another adapted research papers, this one on legendary Olympian Jesse Owens. Mr. Owens, you may remember, was the four-time gold medalist at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. As he was of African descent, Adolf Hitler refused to shake Mr. Owens’  hand after his victories. Incidentally, that was far from the only indignity Jesse Owens endured both as an Olympian and representative of the United States.

I remember two things about preparing and using this assignment: I wrote it to follow closely and clearly the Wikipedia article on Jesse Owens, and for two students who worked on this together, I also prepared, at their request, this additional research assignment on Adolf Hitler because they wanted to understand fully Jesse Owens’ experience in the 1936 Olympics. The Hitler assignment also follows the article on Adolf Hitler on Wikipedia. Both of these assignments are titled, with the name of their subjects, “from A to Z.” You’ll notice that there are 26 vocabulary words and 26 questions, i.e. A to Z in the outline structure.

The two young women for whom I wrote this material made the connection with Joe Louis on their own, which was inspiring to watch–the kind of thing a teacher hopes to see happen, I suppose. I imagine one could put together a short but compelling cross-disciplinary unit on racial and ethnic mythologies (something badly needed, I submit to you), white supremacy, with the experiences of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis as a critical lens.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Adapted Research Papers 5: Darfur and the Government of Sudan

I’m fairly certain that I intended that this structured research assignment on Darfur would be informed by the Wikipedia page on “The War in Darfur.” To be honest, though, I am not entirely certain about that. Part of the problem with the series of research papers I was adapting was that some of them were highly dynamic, changing situations.

In any case, this is a seven-page document that can, as everything else in this series of Adapted Research Papers posts, be manipulated (it’s in Microsoft Word) to the needs of you and your students.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Robert Maynard Hutchins on the Death of Democracy

“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books of the Western World, vol. I, ch. 10 (1952)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Adapted Research Papers 3: Apartheid

As below, here is another adapted research paper, this one on Black and white people in South Africa. So, for documents, here are several readings on Apartheid, the official South African ideology of ethnic segregation and oppression, along with its research questions and citation blanks.

Again, there is plenty of room for improvement in these documents. They’re in Microsoft Word, so they can be exported into other word processing software otherwise manipulated to suit your needs.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Adapted Research Papers 2: Children During the Industrial Revolution

As below, this adapted research paper assignment includes this readings on children in the Industrial Revolution along with its questions and structured citation blanks. The material works together, but if students are able, they might be better served, in order to develop the kinds of procedural knowledge for research and writing this assignment aims to inculcate, to find their own sources to answer these questions.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Fourth Dimension

“Fourth Dimension: A non-Euclidean geometrical concept that first became popular in France around 1910 and that may have influenced the Cubists. Picasso and Braque as well as Marcel Duchamp painted objects from multiple perspectives, suggesting a synthesis of views taken at various points in time. Contemporary artists such as Tony Robbin are once again dealing with issues of the fourth dimension by using computers and concepts based in physics and mathematics.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

Adapted Research Papers 1: Supporting Documents

By 2008, when I started my third and final job working in the New York City Department of Education, I was (or at least I thought I was) beginning to hit my stride in preparing differentiated instruction for struggling learners. When I arrived at my new posting, however, I found I needed to create some sort of differentiation for a research paper project that was a joint requirement of the global studies and English departments.

So, I got right to it. The theme of this research paper assignment was oppression, and there were at least a dozen topics from which to choose. I chose three, made adapted research papers for them, and worked with students on them.

The next year, the scope and content of the assignment changed; the following year, it changed again. I tried to keep up, but in the end I thought it best just to write a set of broad assignments and use those. I’ve posted those in slightly different formats elsewhere on this blog.

Anyway, here are two documents I prepared as supports and instructions for working on these assignments: the first is a learning support that explains research topics and the second is the rules for completing these differentiating assignments. The five posts above this one are the assignments themselves. Let me forewarn you that this is not some of my best work; but rather than throw away these assignments, I’ll post them here in the possibility that someone might be able to use them. Like everything here, these are formatted in Microsoft Word, so you can edit, rewrite, and manipulate them to suit you and your students’ needs.

This series of documents continues for six posts above.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Adapted Research Papers 4: The Holocaust

Moving right along, here is another pair of documents that together, once upon a time, composed an adapted research paper for my struggling students. So, here are several readings on the Holocaust along with their research questions and citation blanks for organizing the information for this assignment.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Collis P. Huntington on his Possessions

“Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”

Collis P. Huntington

Attributed in Robert W. Kent, Money Talks (1985)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.